She spoke indifferently, coldly.  The desire to show her Paradise to him had died away, but the parting words of the Count prompted the question, and so she put it as to a stranger.

“Thank you, Madame—­yes,” he replied, as if with an effort.

She got up, and they went out together on to the broad walk.

“Which way do you want to go?” she asked.

She saw him glance at her quickly, with anxiety in his eyes.

“You know best where we should go, Madame.”

“I daresay you won’t care about it.  Probably you are not interested in gardens.  It does not matter really which path we take.  They are all very much alike.”

“I am sure they are all very beautiful.”

Suddenly he had become humble, anxious to please her.  But now the violent contrasts in him, unlike the violent contrasts of nature in this land, exasperated her.  She longed to be left alone.  She felt ashamed of Androvsky, and also of herself; she condemned herself bitterly for the interest she had taken in him, for her desire to put some pleasure into a life she had deemed sad, for her curiosity about him, for her wish to share joy with him.  She laughed at herself secretly for what she now called her folly in having connected him imaginatively with the desert, whereas in reality he made the desert, as everything he approached, lose in beauty and wonder.  His was a destructive personality.  She knew it now.  Why had she not realised it before?  He was a man to put gall in the cup of pleasure, to create uneasiness, self-consciousness, constraint round about him, to call up spectres at the banquet of life.  Well, in the future she could avoid him.  After to-day she need never have any more intercourse with him.  With that thought, that interior sense of her perfect freedom in regard to this man, an abrupt, but always cold, content came to her, putting him a long way off where surely all that he thought and did was entirely indifferent to her.

“Come along then,” she said.  “We’ll go this way.”

And she turned down an alley which led towards the home of the purple dog.  She did not know at the moment that anything had influenced her to choose that particular path, but very soon the sound of Larbi’s flute grew louder, and she guessed that in reality the music had attracted her.  Androvsky walked beside her without a word.  She felt that he was not looking about him, not noticing anything, and all at once she stopped decisively.

“Why should we take all this trouble?” she said bluntly.  “I hate pretence and I thought I had travelled far away from it.  But we are both pretending.”

“Pretending, Madame?” he said in a startled voice.

“Yes.  I that I want to show you this garden, you that you want to see it.  I no longer wish to show it to you, and you have never wished to see it.  Let us cease to pretend.  It is all my fault.  I bothered you to come here when you didn’t want to come.  You have taught me a lesson.  I was inclined to condemn you for it, to be angry with you.  But why should I be?  You were quite right.  Freedom is my fetish.  I set you free, Monsieur Androvsky.  Good-bye.”